It would have been better if we had never written this text.

And you, dear subscribers, should consider whether you would rather read it only in the printed newspaper.

In an analog medium instead of on a tablet, smartphone or computer.

Not that it contains secret messages, that someone reads what you like or dislike, or that we have something to hide.

But after visiting this exhibition you start to seriously consider whether that really has to be everything: all the photos, status updates and cat videos that we post, view or share every day, the Wikipedia search and Google Maps.

Christoph Schütte

Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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In general, it is better to switch off your own cell phone until further notice. Not that Eva & Franco Mattes really have sensational news to announce. On the contrary, it is much worse. Most of it has long been known, or at least could be known. But “Human-in-the-Loop”, the title of the exhibition, which was set up as a partner project of the fourth Triennale Ray Photography Projects at the Nassauischer Kunstverein, gives us an idea of ​​it.

Initially, this is less about photography as an artistic medium and more about the question of what we do with all the images.

What we reveal when we take a selfie, upload a photo or forward it.

Suddenly what previously seemed abstract as a protocol, as a data stream or transfer, data theft and misuse, becomes oppressively concrete.

This applies to works like "Hannah uncut", which shows nothing in a kind of slide show but the 1276 photos and videos from the phone of a young woman from whom the artists bought her cell phone and the rights to the content, just like for "Personal Photographs" .

An amazingly detailed picture

First of all, you don't see much of the private image files of the Italian duo Eva & Franco Mattes, who live in New York, and which we are talking about here. Except for the data highway of cable routes that meanders through space and on which two hard drives are constantly sending the artist's image files on a circuit that has become a sculpture. That is all, and one might think, as an image, it is quite redundant. What's more, as long as you don't see it, it's not really relevant. Or? Until “My little big data” teaches even the most naive of the visitors wrong. For the 24-minute video, the artists left their browsing history and all of their mail traffic over the past few years to a data analyst,who, based on the basically completely harmless material, generates a kind of portrait of the two artists.

He creates a picture as amazingly detailed as algorithms do unnoticed by the user in order to monitor the further development of our profile a little more attentively.

One would like to call this a dream of the future.

But it is - “My little big data” is from 2019 - possibly long out of date.

It's about power

In any case, you don't want to leave your smartphone switched on anymore, but you don't need it either to watch “The Hymns of Muscovy”, the video work by Dimitri Venkov that is being shown at the Nassauischer Kunstverein in parallel to “Human-in-the-Loop” which one would also like to call science fiction.

Basically, however, the opposite is the case. The flight of the camera may lead the viewer spectacularly through Moscow, along socialist classicism, brutalism and the cool glass facades of the present through the more recent history of Russia since the October Revolution, manifested in architecture. So this is what social progress looks like, one might think to oneself. But what changes is first and foremost the style, what changes, at best the owner of the buildings that are exemplary for an entire epoch. In the end, it seems, here as there it is all about power. And there is never a single person in the “Hymns of Muscovy”.

The exhibitions at Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Wilhelmstraße 15, are open Tuesday to Friday from 2pm to 6pm, Thursday until 8pm and on weekends from 11am to 6pm until August 8th.